3D Modeling

As GroIMP's primary purpose is the modelling of three-dimensional virtual plants, GroIMP's 3D facilities play a prominent role.

Display

An integrated viewer displays the current scene in three dimensions. Easy navigation is enabled by navigation buttons; objects can be selected in the viewer. Currently, the viewer supports a simple wireframe representation on all Systems. An OpenGL-based representation is available for Systems where the _Java Binding for the OpenGL API_ (JOGL) is installed.

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3D navigation

Navigation in the view panel is possible with the navigation buttons in the view panel's upper right corner or with the mouse. To navigate using the buttons, press a button and drag with the mouse while keeping the button pressed. To navigate using the mouse only, press the Shift button and drag with the mouse over the view panel: The left mouse button rotates the view, the middle mouse button moves the viewpoint in the viewing plane, and the right mouse button makes a dolly movement along the viewing direction (or a zoom for a view camera with parallel projection). The mouse wheel works similarly to the right mouse button.

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3D scene visualization

GroIMP has an embedded 3d visualization view and manipulation toolkit. If the project graph contains 3d objects, or object that instantiate 3d objects, it is possible to visualize it in a scene with the 3d view.

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Camera

The Camera menu of GroIMP's 3D view allows the selection of different cameras. Some cameras are predefined, among them the common orthographic projections. Cameras can be selected as current camera and adapted in the Attribute Editor trough Camera > Edit . You can add user-defined cameras to your project in the Camera Explorer: Panels > Explorers >3D > Cameras

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Fit & move

The camera can be moved.

Objects

3D objects can be added to the project to be displayed in the scene. These objects can be added, selected and deleted through the 3D view. The 3D objects includes:

  • 3D geometry objects: Spheres, cones and other primitives, curves and various kinds of NURBS surfaces, heightfields. See the list of 3D object here
  • Lights objects: The list can be found here.
  • Materials: they can be assigned to objects to produce a variety of shading effects in visualization. Materials are defined using a _shading network_: This establishes a data flow through the nodes of the network which finally leads to the visible material properties like colour and opacity. Several kinds of nodes are available: Image maps, procedural maps, transformations. You can freely mix them in the shading network, which gives you great flexibility in defining materials. The list can be found here.

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Toolbar

The 3D toolbar provides buttons to: insert objects (from the 3d objects), and select a 3d editing tool.

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Tools

The currently selected object can be modified using GroIMP's 3D transformation tools. There are three tools available: translation, rotation, and scaling.

To switch between these modes, either click the corresponding button in the toolbar or click on the selected object multiple times to cycle through the modes.

The currently active axis is highlighted in yellow.

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Attribute Editor

The Attribute Editor enable to modify the attributes of an object. When an object is selected, if the attribute editor panel is opened, it will automatically display its attributes. The attribute editor panel allows users to edit a wide range of attributes associated with different types of objects.

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Selection

This section present how to select/ un-select objects in the scene from the GUI. The selections are done through mouse actions. The selected objects are visible on: the 3d view with a different color; the attribute editor with all their shared attributes displayed.

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